Anthony Albanese still hasn't apologised to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi over the podcast exchange about the melons she gave him, and on Tuesday the demand that he do it in person spread past the Coalition, with teal independent Monique Ryan telling him to pick up the phone and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who is also the Minister for Women, refusing to say what she made of the gesture at the centre of it.
Michelle Grattan reported in The Conversation that the Prime Minister doesn't intend to make that call.
The exchange happened on Nova's Bush Deep podcast, recorded at The Lodge with comedian Nikki Osborne. Asked for the worst gift he'd ever been handed overseas, Mr Albanese settled on the melons Ms Takaichi brought him when she visited Australia in May, calling the gift "pretty strange" but "quite good". He said she'd given him "a couple of melons", added "she brought two, as you do", and moved his hands in front of his chest as he said it. Ms Osborne replied that Ms Takaichi "just came in looking like Pamela Anderson", and Mr Albanese answered: "She brought two, and they're beautiful."
A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister told The Australian that the suggestion he was joking about Ms Takaichi's body was wrong. The ABC reported that it asked for the same statement several times and never received it. One News published the melons exchange in July, when the footage was spreading fast and almost all of the coverage was about Kylie Minogue.
Monique Ryan tells Albanese to pick up the phone, and she isn't a Coalition MP
Teal independent Monique Ryan told Nine the podcast appearance was "pretty cringe" and said the Prime Minister hadn't covered himself in glory.
"I think we can probably expect a bit better from our ... chief of state, you know, especially when we're talking about a really special gift that the Japanese state has given to the country. If I were the prime minister, I'd call, pick up the phone to the Japanese prime minister and apologise to her on this one."
Until Tuesday the pressure had come almost entirely from the Coalition, which allowed the government to treat the whole thing as opposition mischief. Ms Ryan sits on the crossbench and owes the Liberals nothing, so her intervention is harder to wave away as politics.
Katy Gallagher is the Minister for Women and won't say what she thinks of the gesture
Ms Gallagher, who holds the women's portfolio alongside finance, told ABC Radio National Breakfast that the remarks "were not intended to be interpreted the way that our political opponents and some media outlets are reporting", and that they'd been read "in a way that he never intended and absolutely rejects".
Asked directly what she thought of a Prime Minister moving his hands in front of his chest while talking about a woman's gift, she declined to give a view.
"I'll let other people make their judgements about it," Ms Gallagher said. "When he says that they have been misreported and misinterpreted in relation to that podcast, then I accept his assurance on that."
When the story first broke in July, Ms Gallagher was on leave and said nothing at all, and Liberal senator Jane Hume named her among the Labor women who had gone missing on it. Her first public word on the matter, a month later, is that everybody else can decide.
Ted O'Brien went to Japan's ambassador and apologised because the Prime Minister hasn't
Shadow Foreign Minister Ted O'Brien confirmed he'd met Japan's ambassador to Australia, Kazuhiro Suzuki, to express what he described as his deep regret about the Prime Minister's remarks. He argued that Tokyo's reluctance to make a fuss is beside the point.
"The fact is ... here you and I are on our national broadcaster talking about the remarks of the Australian prime minister which implies being vulgar and crude to a female leader ... this is a national embarrassment," Mr O'Brien told ABC Radio National Breakfast.
Michaelia Cash wants to know whether Penny Wong told Albanese to apologise
Shadow Attorney-General Michaelia Cash called the gesture dirty and crude, then turned the question towards the Foreign Minister.
"I want to hear directly from our foreign minister. Did you raise this personally with Mr Albanese? Have you raised it with the Japanese government?" Senator Cash told Nine. "But more than that, did you tell your prime minister to apologise of his crude and dirty comments that just haven't embarrassed him, they have now embarrassed Australia."
It's the same question Senator Hume put back in July, when she went through Penny Wong, Clare O'Neil, Tanya Plibersek and Katy Gallagher one by one and asked where every one of them was.
Shingo Yamagami says this is how Japan will remember Anthony Albanese
The row restarted on Monday when Shingo Yamagami, Japan's ambassador to Australia from 2021 to 2023, wrote in The Australian that the joke was insulting and showed real ignorance about what the gift meant.
"However lighthearted it was intended to be, the recent joke delivered by PM Anthony Albanese at the expense of Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi is how he might be remembered by Japanese who most value the friendship with Australia," Mr Yamagami wrote.
He then explained the thing the Prime Minister had called strange. A crown melon is the most prized fruit in Japan, nurtured under intensive care in a special greenhouse, and a single one costs more than 30,000 yen, or roughly $270. Australia only reopened its market to Japanese melons in January, which is exactly why Ms Takaichi chose them, and Mr Albanese enjoyed them enough at dinner that her delegation sent two more.
Ms Takaichi is the first woman to lead Japan and has already been targeted over her body and her gender, including by a Chinese diplomat in Osaka and by opposition politicians in Tokyo. Mr Yamagami wrote that the last thing she expected was to be mocked by the leader of Japan's closest strategic partner in the region.
His history with this government is poor and that's worth stating plainly. He didn't finish his term in Canberra, and he has written before that Penny Wong summoned him in 2021, while she was still in opposition, to warn him off his public criticism of China.
Albanese questioned whether Pauline Hanson could sit down with Japan, weeks before the melons
On 15 June, at a press conference in Jacka in the ACT, Mr Albanese was asked why his cost of living message wasn't cutting through while Pauline Hanson was polling ahead of him as preferred prime minister. He answered by questioning whether she could be trusted in a room with Australia's neighbours, according to the official transcript.
"It's easy to identify grievance. The issue is providing solutions, think about the global fuel crisis that has just occurred and think about whether everyone in public life would be in a position to go to our Asian friends in Singapore, in Brunei, in Malaysia, in China, in South Korea and Japan and say we have a relationship that is important of mutual interest in our region."
He rounded the answer off by saying that securing the fuel supply was "what serious political parties of government are able to achieve". He never said Senator Hanson's name, though he'd been asked about her directly, and the meaning wasn't hard to follow. The suggestion was that she couldn't be sent to deal with Australia's Asian partners, and Japan was on the list he read out.
Around three weeks later he sat down at The Lodge with a comedian and turned the Japanese Prime Minister's state gift into a gesture about her chest. Senator Hanson's European trip, which One News covered in July, cost taxpayers nothing and ended in a standing ovation, and no foreign government had to write to Canberra about it afterwards.
Japan wrote to his department on 13 July and offered to stay quiet so the story would die
The Australian revealed a diplomatic cable dated 13 July, sent to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, in which the Japanese government noted what it called sensationalised reporting in the Australian media, said Tokyo believed there was no ill intention, and undertook to take no action over it. Japan also made clear the melons had been bought legally inside Australia, because the podcast had joked about them being smuggled in. The stated reason for staying quiet was that Japanese silence would let the Australian media move on.
A former senior official, speaking anonymously to news.com.au, spelled out what that generosity actually costs the country.
"At best it's quite embarrassing to be in a position where a foreign embassy or department is officially sending such a message," he said. "With Japan having done so the Australian government is presumably now not only embarrassed at what our prime minister said but somewhat indebted to Japan for their generosity in giving it an official shoulder shrug."
The only apology on record is one written line, and it was about Kylie Minogue
In July the Prime Minister's office put out a statement saying he apologised "unequivocally for the comments". As One News reported then, it was understood to cover his answer in a game of shag, marry or date, in which he picked Kylie Minogue six months into his marriage. He hasn't repeated it out loud at any press conference since, and there has been no direct word to Ms Takaichi, to Ms Minogue, or to the women who said the remarks demeaned them.
Only weeks before the podcast, when a billboard called the then Victorian premier Jacinta Allan a witch, Mr Albanese said it was "completely unacceptable to demean, objectify, belittle or offend women". Less than a week before his written apology, Labor and the Greens voted down attempts by One Nation and the Coalition to restore the biological definition of sex to the Sex Discrimination Act, the law Julia Gillard has acknowledged taking the word woman out of.
Labor's ministers are the only people still saying nothing happened
By Tuesday morning the people calling for a personal apology included Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, Liberal deputy leader Jane Hume, Senator Cash, Mr O'Brien, Ms Ryan, a former Japanese ambassador and a columnist writing in the Japan Times. Mr Taylor said the comments were beneath the office of prime minister and that Mr Albanese should say it himself rather than through a statement.
Everyone still defending him works for him, and that list has been shrinking. Tanya Plibersek said Mr Yamagami was "100 per cent wrong" and that his reading of the podcast was "a complete misinterpretation". Health Minister Mark Butler talked up the strength of the relationship instead. Transport Minister Catherine King said it was a satirical podcast and that "I think we should just move on". Ms Gallagher said she accepts the Prime Minister's assurance that the podcast has been misreported.
One Nation's Barnaby Joyce put it to Ms Plibersek directly on Sunrise.
"I know you're doing the best job you can on this, Tanya, but it's just like the Kylie Minogue comment, completely wrong, completely trying to be clever. It wasn't clever," Mr Joyce said. "It just demeans the office of prime minister, and it certainly has created a massive problem with one of our major partners. I know in your heart, Tanya, you know it's wrong."
Parliament returned at midday on Tuesday, and the Prime Minister spent his morning welcoming Vietnam's President To Lam to Canberra and negotiating with Mr Taylor over gambling advertising. Newspoll published this week put Labor's primary vote at 29%, level with One Nation and the party's worst showing since the final days of the Gillard government, with the Coalition back on 18%.
Mr Albanese hasn't made a bilateral visit to Japan since taking office in 2022, though he did attend a Quad meeting in Tokyo in the days after that election. He'll see Ms Takaichi again later this year at the United Nations and the G20.
